`Alas for America'

Like an awkward adolescent, Emerson’s prose is breathless and clumsy. Its first virtue is profligacy, not grace. His mind outraces his pen. In his journal and occasionally in his essays, the grammar may fail but never the invention. When his genius boils, meaning eludes us but not the music. Emerson’s prose is the closest I know to elegant jazz improvisation. Order and chaos are held in balance. Too much order, the line is dull; too much chaos, it’s incoherent. The resulting tension creates momentum. Emerson’s unit is the sentence, not the paragraph or anything larger. Here’s a passage from his Journal, dated June 1847:

“Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! it all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.

“Eager, solicitous, hungry, rabid, busy-body America attempting many things, vain, ambitious to feel thy own existence, & convince others of thy talent, by attempting & hastily accomplishing much; yes, catch thy breath & correct thyself and failing here, prosper out there; speed & fever are never greatness; but reliance & serenity & waiting & perseverance, heed of the work & negligence of the effect.”

“Ungirt” is Whitman’s word – one he would have used that also describes him (think of this image of Walt) – and Emerson uses it eight years before Leaves of Grass is published. We might say “slovenly.” “Procumbent” I thought I knew but didn’t. Emerson draws it from botany. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first definition as “Of a plant, leaf, or stem: lying flat on the ground, especially without rooting; trailing or growing along the ground.” That leads naturally to a profusion of botanical imagery (“suckers” is a Barnumesque pun). Whitman was to write of grass: “I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.” “Poppy” concludes the plant associations, with a hint of narcotic drowsiness (and of “poppycock” – the OED dates the first use to a New York City newspaper in 1852).

In the second paragraph, Emerson addresses the nation directly, and “rabid” may be his harshest indictment. “Busy-body” dates from the 16th century, but in the American context it recalls Benjamin Franklin’s gossipy, meddlesome essays as “The Busy-Body.” The rhetoric quickens with “vain” and “ambitious,” and perhaps he alludes to the ignoble and illegal Mexican-American War. His United States is an unruly teenager, “ambitious to feel [its] own existence.” In his life of Emerson, Robert D. Richardson writes, “During the first two-thirds of 1847 Emerson was more restless and dissatisfied than he had been for many years.” His indictment of the nation seems to mirror his own uneasiness, Richardson suggests: “Emerson’s dissatisfaction extended to the country at large, to America `the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent.’” Glossing the 1847 journal entry I cited above, Joel Porte writes in Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time:

“It would be a mistake, I think, to attempt to reduce Emerson’s rambling drift here to consecutive thought; its tendencies are clear enough…America `the ungirt’ (`that great sloven continent,’ as Emerson would say in English Traits) wastes its `talent’ now seen in physiological terms, in a kind of lazy, imbecile, polymorphous pouring out of its vital energies. Instead of investing its force in the erection of strong, large, durable trees, it allows itself to be drained by `suckers’ close to the ground. He wants America to calm down, cool off, gather its forces, and invest temperately in future growth.”

Porte is mistaken when he calls the passage “rambling,” though his error helps us understand the charm and strength of Emerson’s best prose. Its energy is focused, but as momentum pushes him along he grabs like a magpie at any word or string of words that attract him and bolster his thought. In a subsequent journal entry, he writes “America is formless, has no terrible & no beautiful condensation,” and he might be describing his own method. Not “formless,” but form improvised for its momentary usefulness, its condensed beauty.